We did not go to work early tonight.
This was partly because since it was merely Ordinary Saturday and not a Bank Holiday, fares were only at normal rates, and not the gloriously worth doing Double Time.
I like Double Time very much indeed.
Some customers complain a great deal about this, especially, last night, a very fat couple who only live round the corner but who are far too idle to walk. They took umbrage at being charged seven pounds and forty pence for a taxi journey which took less than a minute, and said, darkly, that if I didn’t look after the locals I would regret it.
Since I have been a taxi driver for twenty years and never been interested in looking after locals, especially round complaining ones, and so far managed to avoid any sort of price-related remorse, this troubled me not at all.
I accepted their reluctant cash with the greatest of pleasure. It was a happy moment.
The other reason for not rushing was that until yesterday I had forgotten the tiresome inconvenience of having ten thousand extra cars in the village. This is the weekend average for the summer.
They get in the way quite a bit. It is easier to drive once everybody has got out of their car and decamped to the pub to get drunk.
We had a late start to the morning, because of last night’s prolonged activities. During our morning coffee I whinged so much about the way I have been neglected lately that Mark volunteered to do some more refreshing modifications to the camper van.
We have got a horrible bit of ancient carpet in it.
It is a truly dreadful old rag.
The old carpet disintegrated beyond use, and this one started its relationship with us when Mark dragged it out of a skip in order to lie on it whilst doing things underneath the camper van in his shed.
He had several bits of carpet like that, and this one did not get used for that purpose, but was chopped to roughly the shape of the floor in the camper van and laid in, as a short-term emergency measure.
Since then it has become liberally bespattered with mud, oil, dog hair and other vile substances. It was not at all nice to start off with, and it has now become truly unspeakable. I do not like to walk on it in bare feet.
We have got a new carpet saved for the purpose of replacement.
Mark said that today he would go and get some underlay and put the carpet in.
I was grateful and admiring. This is always a good move when you want something unpleasant to be done.
Whilst he was out I took the dogs up the fell. The children had been told that this was voluntary over the weekend, as opposed to compulsory on normal days, and both declined to accompany us. This meant that actually we managed to get up to the top and back rather faster than usual. The daffodils are out at long last, but there was nothing lonely about the accompanying clouds.
When Mark went to the camper van to start carpet-related activities he came back looking bleak. We had forgotten to turn off the thing that converts battery power into the sort of power that you can use in a hairdryer, and all the batteries had gone flat.
He was cross with himself about this, although he was only one of the four people who had forgotten to do it. Instead of doing anything else carpety he retreated to his shed to nail wires together. He has long had a gadget which will stop this happening, but not found time to fit it, and he was determined that we would not make this mistake again.
He grumbled and muttered and swore for a while, whilst I hung washing and made picnics and generally made ineffective soothing noises, but in the end it was done.
We had to have a sleep then, because of the long night ahead, so the carpets will have to be tomorrow now, when he has recharged the batteries and recovered his tranquillity.
The brakes need attention again. So does one of the taps.
That is an awful lot of things to do before Tuesday. We are going to be jolly busy.
On Tuesday we are going away in it.
It is too exciting for words.
